In article <3a694026$0$81167$65a95bcd / news.citilink.com>,
jstern / foshay.citilink.com  wrote:

> Comparison of Ada and C++ is off-topic now, so I'll just mention
> factual issues.
> 
> Larry J. Elmore <ljelmore / home.com> wrote:
> 
>>I think of C mostly as a very high-level portable assembler, but
>>unfortunately it also forces a number of assumptions about the
>>environment that are difficult to escape. There's a project somewhere
>>to design a true VHL portable assembler without the drawbacks of C,
>>but I've lost the link and can't remember it.
> 
> C-- is being worked on as a portable intermediate language that could
> interface with compiler back ends.  But I'm sure there are other,
> similar projects.

That's probably what I was thinking of.

>>One thing I particularly like about Ada95 over C++ is the way
>>exception handling is done. In Ada it's built-in, the only code you
>>have to write is the exception handler itself. If a block of code
>>doesn't have an exception handler for a given exception, it's handed
>>up to the next higher block of code until a handler is found. The
>>default top-level handlers will terminate the program and spit out an
>>error message, of course.  
> 
> That is the way exceptions work in C++.  

Except that you have to explicitly surround blocks of code you want
protected with try {}, don't you? It looks like a bag stuck onto the
side of the language to me. It's not integral.

Larry